Anat Zanger

City and Memory:

Jerusalem in Israeli Cinema
ABSTR ACT
What might be the affinity between the palimpsest of a city space and
memory? What happens if the city in question is the eternal city of Jerusalem? The article unravels interactions between the real, physical place
and its traces in the symbolic geography of cinema between collective
and individual memory as recorded on film. Three films guide this study:
Himmo King of Jerusalem (Amos Guttman, 1987, based on Yoram Kaniuks
novel), The Cemetery Club (Tali Shemesh, 2006), and Jerusalem Cuts (Liran
Atzmor, 2008). Each film introduces a different relation into the dialectic
between memory and forgetting. All the films narrative structures contain
the past and revolve around attempts to embody and construe it between
the abstract and material qualities of the city of Jerusalem and the cinematic
medium.

The relation between collective memory

and the act of remembering is always personal1

INTRODUCTION

unravel the interactions between the physical place and its

traces in the symbolic geography of cinema and between collective and
individual memory, as they emerge from study of three films: Himmo King
of Jerusalem (Amos Guttman, 1987),2 Jerusalem Cuts (Liran Atzmor, 2008),3
and The Cemetery Club (Tali Shemesh, 2006).4 Himmo King of Jerusalem
introduces recollections of the 1948 War of Independence from competing viewpoints: a consensual collective memory of the events versus the
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memories of wounded soldiers returning from battle. In the non-fiction

film Jerusalem Cuts (2008), archival pictures of besieged Jerusalem are
intertwined with the collective memory of Jerusalem as constructed from
the two conflicting stances of Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians. In each film,
photographic images of the city serve as historical traces and the starting
point of a journey. The Cemetery Club (2006), also a non-fiction film, is set
in the Mount Herzl National Cemetery in Jerusalem, which then serves as
an anchor for other places and memories: Europe and the Second World
War, Herzl and the events of 1948un lieu du mmoire in Pierre Noras
terms.5
In the opening scene of Amos Guttmans 1987 film Himmo King of
Jerusalem,6 a young woman is seen pacing amidst wreaths of smoke towards
an improvised military hospital, as gunfire is heard in the background. She
reaches St. Hieronymus monastery, an isolated building, which we learn
from the titles was requisitioned as an improvised hospital during the siege
of Jerusalem in 1948. The burial of a patient who has died is underway in
the monasterys courtyard. The woman, Hamutal, introduces herself as a
nurse who came from Tel-Aviv to help with the wounded at the hospital
but has lost her way in the long corridors until she eventually finds herself
facing the physician in charge. The monastery appears in this opening as
an isolated site belonging to Jerusalem but also outside of it.
Guttmans choice of setting is sustained by the sites structure, which
contains within itself several spacesthe improvised military hospital and
a sacred Christian site. The multiplicity of spaces is expressed by a conjunction of signifiers appearing alongside each other: religious icons and liturgical vessels, a bell tower and chapel are juxtaposed with stretchers, sick beds,
an improvised operating room, trays of medicines and medical equipment.
The hospital is a heterotopic space as defined by Michel Foucault;7 it is a
space of crisis enclosing a multitude of conflicting spaces and as such is a
suitable setting to reflect the world outside of it.
In regard to Guttmans cinematic language and location we may ask
why he chose to situate it in Jerusalem but not to show the city itself. Why
does he flood the space with conflicting signifiers? I would argue that the
answers lie in the space of doubt created by the film. While the time-space
or chronotope (as coined by Bakhtin)8 of Guttmans film is Israels War
of Independence and the siege of Jerusalem, the heterotopic space of the
film enables controversyat times even in opposition to consensual and
collective memoryto rise to the surface. Moreover, I would argue that
this representation is paradigmatic of the way in which the city is present
in Jewish culture and in Israeli cinema.

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On the one hand, territorial anomaly has characterized the connection
between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel from time immemorial.
For almost 2000 years of Jewish exile, Jerusalem and the Land of Israel
functioned as a displaced signifier severed from its referent. On the other
hand, the cinematic medium, composed as it is of moving images, enfolds
the dialectics of physical referents and their representations, the suspension of presence and absence, and the tension between the real and the
imaginary. Jerusalem, as it appears in cinematic texts, is a palimpsest space
of memory between the past and the present, between the individual and
the collective. Thus the way in which the city is inscribed in Guttmans
film, simultaneously written into and erased from it, is characteristic of
the city itself and the way it is understood symbolically in Israeli culture.
Jerusalems figuration in the film hence provokes questions about the citys
past and memory.
While Guttmans is a feature film proposing an alternative to the
hegemonic collective memory, the two later films are documentaries that
explicitly situate memory and the status of archival material at their center.
All three films deal with questions such as: How may one remember and
explore different kinds of memory? What is the meaning of documentation
in an age in which we are inundated with ocular evidence? What happens
when testimonies contradict each other and what is the relation between
memory and forgetting? Ultimately, all three films provide an alternative
to hegemonic collective memory by manipulating space; by hypermnesis (a
flooding of memory and testimony) and anamnesis (reliving, making the
past present). The films narrative structure contains the past and revolves
around attempts to embody and construe it in the context of the present.
A PORT CITY ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY9
Duncan Bell coins the term mythscape to define a temporal-spatial
dimension that is a battlefield for the control of memory and shaping
myths.10 This is a reception space in which the symbolic images and
narratives of the city are produced and reproduced by historical and cultural texts. Over the years of exile, geographical distance from the city,
like that from the Land of Israel itself, created a deluge of signifiers, a
sort of inverted pyramid regarding the actual city. Yehuda Amichai, the
renowned Israeli poet, applies an ironic gaze in his works that engage with
the long-standing tradition of Jerusalems imagery. He portrays the city as
a ship always seaworthy and ready to sail on from one eternal image to the

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next. In his Poems of Jerusalem Cycle, he alternates between fact and fiction.11 The poems last line reads: The coming and going, gates and golden
domes/Jerusalem is Gods Venice.12 As Glenda Abramson notes, Amichai
uses a playful extended metaphor in this poem, which sees Jerusalem, a
waterless city, as a port on the shore of eternity with the Temple Mount as
a great ship that always arrives, always sets sail.13
How have these images been transmitted and transformed throughout
time and tradition and what is the cinemas unique role in this transfiguration? Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, for example, defines Jerusalem as Ground
Zero of Jewish holiness and the Hebrew imagination,14 while art researcher
Bianca Khnel in addressing the citys visual images notes that Jerusalem
is reconstructed time and again, always from a different perspective.15
Rachel Elior proposes a perception that also matches the citys impact as
represented in cinema:
The built Jerusalem and its abstract and palpable symbols, encoded in materiality and decoded anew in the spirit of each generation, mirror the depth
of the well of the past, and its reflections in the present, the intertwined
legends, beliefs, dreams, and memories. The profundities of hope, the pain
and agonies, the anticipations, and the disputes.16

Hanna WiertNesher identifies the inherent distance between the real

city and the cultural text.17 The encounter with the ordinary city, that
city of everyday lifebare life as Giorgio Agamben articulates itis present in film due to the filmic mediums concreteness.18 For the film camera,
as Walter Benjamin remarked, does not suffice itself with observation. By
juxtaposing pieces of reality, the camera conducts a surgical intervention
in that reality. 19 Thus, the films own materiality challenges the essence
of Jerusalem as both a concrete and an abstract symbol. The task facing
Israeli cinema, then, is to write the city of Jerusalem as present and absent
at the same time.
Many cinematic texts are set in Jerusalem and address the citys past
and the memory of it, both implicitly and explicitly. Feature films, including Three Days and a Child from 1967,20 My Michael from 1978,21 Someone
to Run With from 2006,22 and Seven Minutes in Heaven from 2008,23
are structured around retrospection. The use of flashbacks constitutes an
attempt to understand events of the past from the point of view of the
films present in which the final outcome is already known. There are also
many documentary films focusing on Jerusalem that attempt to understand
the citys political and symbolic place through cinematic enquiry into its

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cultural, photographic, and cinematic past. Prominent among these are
David Perlovs 1963 documentary In Jerusalem,24 which conducts a dialogue
with French director Chris Markers 1960 film Description dun combat (The
Third Side of the Coin)25 and Ron Havilios 19861997 film, Jerusalem:
Fragments,26 which refers to David Perlovs aforementioned film as well as
other photographers who documented the city. A more recent project is
Footsteps in Jerusalem (2013), a collection of short films that constitute an
homage to Perlovs film made fifty years before.27
The three films I discuss here, however, propose an open past, which
allows the unexpected to emerge. Thomas Elsaessers observation regarding the past and the media is pertinent here: Due to its reversibility and
undeadness in the mediathe past is kept open for unexpected return
visits and for permanent rewrites, as the special condition of its sounds and
images enabling and empowering the present.28 I now turn to Himmo King
of Jerusalem and Jerusalem Cuts for the next part of my discussion.
THE WOUNDED BODY AND HYPERMNESIS
Following Freud, Andreas Huyssen has noted that a single place cannot
contain different contents. He adds, however, that imaginary urban space,
with its multitude of times, can posit different things in the same site.
There are memories of what was once in the place, alongside imaginary
alternatives. The traces of urban spaces are palpable but also merge with the
imaginary and with the past, with erasures, losses, and heterotopia.29 This
distinction is certainly apt with regard to such an ancient city as Jerusalem.
In this context we may say that both Guttman and Atzmor chose to situate
their cameras in the gap created between one imaginary space and another
in the same period.
Amos Guttmans film is set in a location where two different spaces
coexist: the National Military Hospital and the Holy Christian Monastery.
The friction between these two spaces and the seclusion of the monastery,
at once in the city but isolated from it, produces a world with its own rules,
which offers an alternative to the national utopia. The battle for Jerusalem
goes on but in the monastery, which has been requisitioned as a hospital,
the testimony of the wounded body challenges the war and its rationale.
Most of the events in the film take place inside the building, with only
a few exceptions set in the back yard where the dead are being buried, and
on a balcony where a party celebrating the end of the siege of Jerusalem is
underway. Only towards the end of the film, Jerusalem is seen from afar.

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During the film, the outside world in which a war is being waged penetrates
the improvised hospital building only through the sounds of gunfire and
explosions heard in the distance and via the radio broadcasting military
dispatches, songs such as Shoshana Damaris We Left Slowly (Yatzanou
Att) and programs featuring soldiers talking.
Himmo King of Jerusalem suggests a replacement of the national
soundtrack: Now listen to my music, says one of the patients, Assa (Dov
Navon), and plays classical music instead. On another occasion, Frenzi asks
his friend Assa to sing him a Yiddish lullaby. In the monastery hospital,
the hegemonic, national discourse echoes haltingly, between cries of pain,
treatments, surgeries, and bodies being borne to the courtyard for burial.
The internal world of the hospital is made present in the film through both
its visual track and in its diegetic voice.
Hamutal has lost her beloved in the war. She comes to Jerusalem
from Tel-Aviv to volunteer in the hospital and falls in love with the most
seriously wounded soldier of all, Himmo, who is nicknamed by his fellow
patients with names from the past: Flower and King of Jerusalem and
in the present, Golem (formless thing, or idiot). Himmo has had both
legs and one arm amputated and lies encased in plaster, his blinded eyes
swathed in bandages. Scarcely conscious, he murmurs sht me (shoot
me). Hamutal nurses him with an attentiveness that makes the other
patients jealous. She even puts her bed next to his to stay close to him.
Hamutal and Himmos relationship is observed by everyone in the ward.
Marry him suggest the recovering wounded in the Bell Room, adding
You have to choose between a wedding or a bullet. Later, Assa explains to
his friends (and to the spectators) Its either Eros or Thanatos.30 Hamutal
carries out Himmos wishes by administering a lethal injection to him.
When another patient says that Ben-Gurion has announced there is a
State of Israel on the radio, his friend Assa replies: The State of Israel is
there, in Tel Aviv, here were under siege.31 The film thus situates what
Julia Kristeva calls the abject32 as an impureness that society casts off
from sight. The hospital for the casualties of war is depicted in the film as
a place outside of place, while the discourse held within it seeks to form
an alternative to the hegemonic narrative.
Liran Atzmors Jerusalem Cuts also deals with the battle for Jerusalem
in 1948 but from a different point of view. This documentary film examines
the various ways the battle is recorded in still photographs and on film as
well as the way collective memory of the war is preserved and reinforced
by archival material. An additional view is also suggested by the films
provenance in Jerusalem 60 years after the battle for it.

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The city itself is populated by a multiplicity of ethnic and religious
groups (Jewish and Arab, secular and ultra-Orthodox) living side by side
in constant tension. That tension has intensified since 2000 following the
Al-Aqsa Intifada (Palestinian uprising) and the construction of a barrier wall
that divides the citys Palestinian neighborhoods from the Jewish ones, and
sometimes one Palestinian village from another.33
THEN AND NOW
Jerusalem Cuts is constructed around different perspectives that join together
over time to imbue the numerous stills images in the film with meaning,
or through the encounter between then and now, in accordance with
Walter Benjamin.34 While juxtaposing memories of the citys past with
its present, the film proposes a journey in the footsteps of photographers
and events, and how they were preservedespecially the battle in 1948,
the capture of East Jerusalem and the Old City in 1967, and the Second
Intifada. The film consists of three interconnected circles: first, John Philips
is a stills photographer covering the Jewish perspective during the battle
for Jerusalem in 1948. In the films present, his grandson displays a collection of his grandfathers photographs in the Philips Archive in New York.
The film also covers the exhibition of Philips work held in Jerusalem in
the euphoric atmosphere following the Six-Day War in 1967. Second,
Jack Padwa, producer of the renowned feature film Hill 24 Doesnt Answer
(1954) about the battle for Jerusalem, is seen in the cutting room of the
Jerusalem Cinematheque, watching his film, flying in a helicopter with his
son over the Old City of Jerusalem, and discussing options for peace. The
third circle involves Zaki Zaarour, son of Ali Zaarour, the first Palestinian
photographer to document the battle for Jerusalem. In the films present,
Zaki searches for an album of his fathers photographs, which disappeared
when Israel captured the Old City in 1967.
Mirroring the structure of a matryoshka, a Russian nested doll, Liran
Atzmors own journey retraces first the journey of photographer John Philips, who in turn follows the traces of his own photographs during an
exhibition held in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War. Jack Padwas journey
takes place in the past, in Jerusalem, and is based on his autobiography
as it appeared in the film Hill 24 Doesnt Answer, moving in the present
between New York and the Film Archives in Jerusalem. The innermost doll
is Zaarours journey. Atzmor recreates Zaki Zaarours search for his fathers
photographs, which he succeeds in tracking down towards the end of the

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213

film, in the Israeli army archive (IDFA). To reach the archive, Zaki and his
son must negotiate the various checkpoints scattered along the route from
their neighborhood near Jerusalem to the Tel-Aviv area. Thus the three
archives, two photographers, one producer, two wars, one intifada, stills
and footage, are all seen from both Israeli and Palestinian points of view
and each tells a different story.
Jerusalem Cuts revolves around a single eventthe battle for Jerusalemas seen from Jewish and Palestinian perspectives, in both the present
and the past. The archive here is at the center of the film while its many
sources seem to work against each other, as each document is traced and
re-examined in the present, hence questioning the entire archives validity.
The two films, Himmo King of Jerusalem and Jerusalem Cuts, direct our gaze
at what remains outside of hegemonic national discourse. Tali Shemeshs
film The Cemetery Club, which I discuss in the next part of this article,
introduces a different kind of cinematic memory through its depiction of
the daily lives of two elderly sisters-in-law, both Holocaust survivors who
are haunted by their past. The film examines the place of the Zionist utopia
in the heterotopic space of the national cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem
from the points of view of the two women living between here and there.
CITY, MEMORY, AND ANAMNESIS
The Cemetery Club (2006) is also set in Jerusalem, this time in the national
cemetery on Mt. Herzl, where Theodor Herzl, as well as other notable
figures in Israels history, is buried. It is also Israels main military cemetery.
In Shemeshs nonfictional film, however, the cemetery serves as a venue
where a group of pensioners, all originally from Eastern Europe, meet to
conduct social and cultural activities. It is their regular meeting place until
the participants increasing physical limitations compel them to meet in
their sheltered housing instead. Clutching folding chairs, the members of
the Herzl Academy (aka The Cemetery Club) arrive for their Saturday
morning get-together on Mount Herzl. They walk past Herzls grave without giving it a second glance, strolling between the rows of tombstones in
the military cemetery until they reach their usual meeting-place, on a lawn
under a shady tree. They arrange their chairs in a circle on the lawn, sit
down, and open the meeting, which has a different theme each time and
always ends with a picnic.
This practice challenges the designated function of Mt. Herzl, which is,
as Henri Lefebvre calls it, a conceived space.35 At the same time, it enables

214 isr ael studies, volume 21 number 3

the pensioners to perform alternative speech acts36 through interactions
created between subject and space. Michel de Certeau addresses the panoramic aspect of a city observed from afar, as a gaze ostensibly representing
knowledge but which is in fact merely an optical illusion of knowledge.37
By contrast, the pedestrians gaze offers a gaze from beneath. The unmediated contact that a citys residents or visitors have with it generates broadening practices that do not necessarily accord with the planned space, orin
the case of Jerusalemwith the traditional utopian space associated with its
designation as the eternal city. In The Cemetery Club, these individual alternatives embody occurrences in the present with memory and forgetting,
which are linked to exile, illness, and death. They are personal memories,
however, which well up into present-day occurrences, and intertwine with
the collective memory that is commemorated on Mount Herzl as one of
the main national lieux de mmoire in Jerusalem.38
Throughout the film, the spatial presence of the cemetery and the
recurring practice of walking between the graves create glimpses of the
past seen beyond the present. The protagonists of The Cemetery Club roam
through a space that is constantly being constructed, evolving into another
kind of space. It is a heterotopic space, where the past is always rewritten
beneath the present. While the images show the characters in the Jerusalem
space in the present, their thoughts and memories are elsewhere. The characters in the film thus perceive and experience Jerusalem space as a place
infused with subjectivity.
The past is also present in the films soundtrack, and in the home video
of the participants journey to Poland. The Cemetery Club offers different
versions of events in the past, presented by the characters themselves,
sometimes in Hebrew, sometimes in Polish. The two main protagonists are
Minya, the directors grandmother, and Lena, Minyas sister-in-law. At the
meetings on Mt. Herzl there are constant recollections of a past belonging
to there, to Europe, through the topics discussed at the meetings (Kant,
the Babi Yar massacres of 1941, German poetry, etc.). However, the battle
for memory unfolds most distinctly in the constant dialogue between the
sisters-in-law, through the gap in times and perspectives created between
the images and the soundtrack.
Their recollections also constitute a battle for the right to tell the story
and to have the last word. Thus, for example, in the sequence in which Lena
and Minya are seated in a living room watching a video of Minya in Poland
on the street where her childhood home used to be, Minya is filmed from
behind, walking along the street. As she sees the house she exclaims That
was my house! At that point, choked with tears, Minya argues with Lena

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215

who sits watching her, in the present of the film. Why did Lena say there
was no house? I dont understand. This time Lena says nothing. They keep
talking and arguing in the film within the filmwhich provides them with
an opportunity of saying things that they could not say otherwise.
The affinity between the body and the city, between here and there,
is based in The Cemetery Club on Lena and Minyas subjective, sometimes
contradictory, memories. The body both sees and is surrounded by the
space of Jerusalem but remembers something else, so that the act of seeing
as knowledge is questioned. Is the action being filmed more valid than
the spoken memories raised in the film? Is the fact that the house that was
once home in a far-away exile, reflected in the way that Jerusalem space is
only glimpsed in the film, mostly while the characters are walking? Is this a
stubborn attempt to continue the wandering in exile that has characterized
the Jewish people for centuries?
Sitting in her study, Lena tells the director some of her memories from
the Ghetto. She talks about her sister who died, the starving, shaven-headed
women crammed into railway carriages who she cannot forget. We were
always hungry she says, six months after the war began we were starving,
and then immediately says she feels unwell and requests that they stop the
conversation. I must eat, Im in pain. I really cant go on. In her kitchen,
moving nervously around, nibbling on a matzo, she adds Ive never been
so hungry as now. At this moment, the body is the site where an affinity
is immediately written between past and present.
In place of history, the film proposes anamnesis (remembering in
Greek), which according to Jean Francois Lyotard involves elaboration and
processing of the event.39 History and anamnesis, Lyotard continues, both
preserve the presence of what tends to be forgotten but history purports
to be faithful to what actually happened whereas anamnesis allows the
unknown to emerge and unexpected aspects of events to guide it. History
reconstructs a lost object that belongs to the past, whereas anamnesis points
to what is here now; the enduring traces of the lost object. Anamnesis is
incapable of closure; its aim is to locate, through association, the repetitive
appearance of meaningful signifiers.
MEMORY VS ANAMNESIS
This discussion examines one earlier, feature film (from 1987) and two later
documentaries (2006, 2008). Each is set in Jerusalem and deals with the
tension between the collective memory of place and the subjective memory,

216 isr ael studies, volume 21 number 3

as well as between remembering and forgetting. The feature film Himmo
King of Jerusalem seems to be unique as it does not involve extra-textual
visual elements like Hill 24 Doesnt Answer, which is cited in Jerusalem Cuts,
or the home video from Poland, which is included in The Cemetery Club.
Nevertheless, Himmo King of Jerusalem does offer a critical insight about
memory of the city and the trauma of war. Like the two later films, it refuses
to cleave to the hegemonic narrative.
The two non-fiction films we have discussed here return to events in
the past while recruiting a familiar arsenal of still pictures, film sequences
(both fictional and non-fictional), interviews, and conversation between
the protagonists to document the city while returning to events from the
past. Each chooses a different standpoint vis--vis the past of the city and
its memory, however.
Jerusalem Cuts presents second hand memories. Archival materials
are added to documentary and other materials from the diegetic present.
The archival materials offer a multiplicity of perspectivesnot only the
Israeli versus Palestinian collective memory, but also a new interpretation
contradicting earlier ones. In this sense, the archive at the center of the
film is hypermnesic. It provokes mal darchive (archive sickness), in Jacques
Derridas terms: The archive always and a priori works against itself.40
The Cemetery Club presents a post-memory that refuses to be archived.
There is no archive as such, but the film takes place in a site of memory:
the protagonists return to the national cemetery and inscribe themselves
in this site of remembrance, over and over again. While the filmmaker
records the actual process of remembering, she is acting in opposition to
the archive because, again in Derridas words, Without deposits, there
is no archive.41 The film reveals the everyday, multi-layered existence in
which the past ferments beneath the present. The experiences rising to the
surface through the process of remembering together with resistance to
memory constitute resistance to the act of archiving. History is not merely
being written but is embodied in a simultaneous writing and erasing: not
hypermnesis but anamnesis.
Himmo King of Jerusalem similarly highlights the tension between
utopic and heterotopic spaces; between the body, space, and memory.
Both these films employ Jerusalem space to suggest alternative paths. In the
diachronic structure of both Himmo King of Jerusalem and Jerusalem Cuts,
historiography is displaced by the erasure of memory; the wound is made
present instead of the archive.

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217

CONCLUSION: MEMORY OF A CITY

Henri Lefebvre discerns that space is always produced: economically, historically, and socially.42 As I have shown here, Jerusalems chronotope, i.e.,
its spatiality as produced in the particular periods (the War of Independence
and the second Intifada), epitomizes the constant friction between secular
and sacred spaces, as well as between personal and collective time.43 Documentation of Jerusalems chronotope facilitates the depiction of alternative
narratives written alongside the hegemonic one.
Jerusalem, as both a metaphor and metonym for the Land of Israel,
is a real, physical place as well as a cultural sign loaded with narratives and
images producing its historical and cultural memory.44 In Psalm 137:56 we
read, If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.45 Since Biblical times, memory of the city has been
linked with corporality and concern about forgetting it. In Jewish and
Israeli culture, this dialectic between remembering and forgetting Jerusalem
is continuously being rewritten and is well represented in the cinematic
medium that plays between memory and oblivion. The city is the place
where the body is re-exposed, transformed, contested, and re-inscribed.
The body, for its part, re-inscribes the urban landscape.46
Place and its material attributes hold the keys to both memory and forgetting. Within its own materiality, the cinematic medium frames the place
through narrative and composition, simultaneously creating a memory
of that place.47 In the films examined here, attempts to elicit a narrative
through the events, to create a history connecting collective memory to
subjective forgetting, or to locate a personal history within the city, would
seem to be unsuccessful. The merging of time, the multiplicity of spaces,
the struggle between memory and forgetting, between writing and erasure,
all signify the citys desire to create a coherent narrative, but equally prove
it incapable of writing its own history. Film as an art of memory has a
unique affinity with both memory and place. As Giuliana Bruno observes,
Film itself draws memory maps. In its memory theatre, the spectator-passenger, sent on an architectural journey, endlessly retraces the itineraries of
a geographically localized discourse.48 Jerusalem, as it appears in cinematic
memory, is a palimpsest space where wandering figures are observed on a
quest to understand their past in a city where the past is made present by
its absence.49

218 isr ael studies, volume 21 number 3

Notes
1. Amos Funkenstein, Image and Historical Awareness in Judaism and its
Cultural Milieu (Tel-Aviv, 1991), 15 [Hebrew].
2. Amos Guttman, dir., Himmo King of Jerusalem (Israel, 1987) based on Yoram
Kaniuks novel by the same name.
3. Liran Atzmor, dir., Jerusalem Cuts (Israel and Switzerland, 2008).
4. Tali Shemesh, dir., Cemetery Club (Israel, 2006).
5. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire,
Representations 26 (1989): 725.
6. The film is an adaptation of Yoram Kaniuks novel of the same name (TelAviv, 1966) [Hebrew].
7. Also known as St. Jerome.
8. Michel Foucault Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, Architecture,
Mouvement, Continuit 5 (1984 [1969]): 469.
9. Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel
(19371938), in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
84258 (Austin and London, 1981 [1975]).
10. Yehuda Amichai, Poems of Jerusalem: A Bilingual Edition (New York, 1988).
11. Duncan Bell, Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology and National Identity,
British Journal of Sociology 54.1 (2003): 6381.
12. Yehuda Amichai, Poems of Jerusalem: A Bilingual Edition (New York, 1988).
13. Translated by Assia Gutman.
14. Glenda Abramson, Jerusalem, in The Writing of Yehuda Amichai (New
York, 1989), 136.
15. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, tTo What Shall I Compare You?: Jerusalem as
Ground Zero of the Hebrew Imaginationv, PMLA 122.1 (2007): 224.
16. Bianca Khnel, Introduction, in The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish,
Christian and Islamic Art (Jerusalem, 19978).
17. Rachel Elior, JerusalemLetters and Marks around It, Dimuy 19 (2000):
115 [Hebrew].
18. Hanna Wierdt-Nesher, City Codes Reading the Modern Urban Novel (New
York, 1996), 9.
19. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford,
CA, 1998).
20. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 21753 (New
York, 1968 [1936]).
21. Uri Zohar, dir. (Israel, 1967), based on a short story by A. B. Yehoshua
(Tel-Aviv, 1965).
22. Dan Waldman, dir. (Israel, 1975), adapted from Amos Ozs novel by the
same name (Tel-Aviv, 1968). See Nurit Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film
(Tel-Aviv, 1993), 14371 [Hebrew].

City and Memory: Jerusalem in Israeli Cinema

219

23. Oded Davidoff, dir. (Israel, 2006), adapted from David Grossmans novel
by the same name (Bnei Brak, 1994).
24. Omri Givon, dir. (Israel, 2009).
25. David Perlov, dir., In Jerusalem (Israel, 1963).
26. Chris Marker, dir., Description dun combat (Israel and France, 1960).
27. Ron Havilio, dir. (Jerusalem 19871999.)
28. The project was made by students at the Sam Spiegel Film School in
Jerusalem, as an initiative of the Schools Head, film director Rennen Shor.
29. Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema: Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory
Since 1945 (New York and London, 2014).
30. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Redwood City, 2003).
31. On camp aspects of Amos Guttmans film, see Yosefa Loshitzky, Deaths
Bride: Phallocentricity and War in Himmo King of Jerusalem, in Fictive Gazes on
Israeli Cinema, ed. Nurit Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Jud Neeman (Tel-Aviv, 1998),
24760 [Hebrew]; Hannah Sucker-Svegger on Yoram Kaniuks complete works in
The Breakdown of the Native Production Machine: An Anti-Oedipal reading of
Yoram Kaniuks Work, Ot 1 (2010): 6599 [Hebrew].
32. See Loshitzkys discussion of the tension between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem
and masochistic discourse in the film in Deaths Bride: Phallocentricity and War
in Himmo King of Jerusalem, in Fictive Gazes on Israeli Cinema, 24760.
33. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, 1982).
34. See Michal Govrin, Layers of Changing Space in Jerusalem: View from a
Hilltop, Hebrew Studies 46 (2006): 3858 [Hebrew].
35. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1999 [1972]).
36. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London, 1991 [1974]); Lefebvre
defines conceived space as conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners
and urbanists (ibid., 38). He understood conceived space as a dialectic between
lived or experienced space and perceived space (the material aspect of space).
See also discussion in William J.T. Mitchell, Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine,
and the American Wilderness, Critical Inquiry 26.2 (2000): 19323.
37. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA,
1975). De Certeau followed Austin in also understanding human activity in space
as performative.
38. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 91130.
39. See Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire,
trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 725.
40. Jean Franois Lyotard, Anamnesis of the Visible, Theory, Culture, and
Society 21.1 (2004): 10719.
41. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Diacritics 25.2
(1995): 963.
42. Ibid.
43. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (London, 1991 [1974]).

220 isr ael studies, volume 21 number 3

44. Or as Zali Gurevitch terms it big time and small time. Zali Gurevitch,
The Israeli Present, On Israeli and Jewish Place (Tel-Aviv, 2007 [2004]), 81102
[Hebrew.
45. See Christine Boyers discussion of the city in her history of Rome, The
City of Collective Memory, Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments
(Cambridge, MA, 1994).
46. Psalm 137:56.
47. ee Elizabeth Grosz, Bodies/Cities, in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz
Colomina (Princeton, 1992), 24154, where she defines mutual relations between
bodies and cities.
48. On film space and narrative, see Stephen Heath, Narrative Space, Screen
17.3 (1976): 68112.
49. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film
(New York, 2002), 223.
50. Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran, On Place (Israeli Anthropology),
Alpayim 4 (1991): 944 [Hebrew].

ANAT ZANGER is an Associate Professor at the Department of Film and

Television at Tel-Aviv University. Her recent publications include: Film
Remakes as Ritual and Disguises from Carmen to Ripley (Amsterdam, 2006);
Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (London, 2012);
and coeditor, Just Images: The Cinematic and Ethics (Newcastle upon Tyne,
UK, 2012).

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